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September 2002

Now Playing At The Adelphia-Astoria
Signs

By Issy Chaplin

Some people around here might be tickled by the notion that aliens are hiding out in Bucks County. Certainly, the notion made Adam Jeffers smirk as he watched Signs, the genuinely creepy film starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, which focuses on that very premise. Jeffers, who owns the old Adelphia-Astoria movie house at the corner of East State and Stockton Streets, loves the idea of Pennsylvania's rolling fields being infiltrated by creatures more tall than little and more gray than green. At the same time, he says, he'll never go on a haunted hayride again. "And people are afraid to come to Trenton," he remarks. "Sheesh."

Signs, the latest ethereal mystery from M. Night Shyamalan, the Pennsylvania native who brought us The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, follows Graham Hess (Gibson), a farmer and widower who has walked away from life as a minister after his wife is killed in that rarest of tragedies-an honest accident. When a huge design is cut into his cornfield overnight, and shadows and bumps in the night draw his children into the fields, he has no alternative but to seek the truth behind the strange goings-on. His brother Merrill (Phoenix), a former minor-league baseball slugger who has moved back to the farm since Graham lost his wife, shadows him, a little more open to the possibility that something truly extraordinary is going on.

Shyamalan has always made textured films, but Signs goes deeper in mood than anything he's done before. Part of this results from Gibson's performance - his Graham Hess is as wise as he is burdened from this first moment he appears. His children - played by Rory Culkin (who looks like but acts better than his older brother Macaulay) and Abigail Breslin - each have their own moods and intricacies, which are revealed layer by layer to be sometimes disturbing, sometimes delightful ("There's a monster outside my window. Can I have a glass of water?" asks Breslin, as Hess's daughter). Shyamalan builds his story leisurely, piece by piece, each scene unveiling just a bit more detail about crop circles, Hess's lost wife, Merrill's lost career, and the children's strong sense of impending catastrophe. There is almost no blood to speak of in this film, and no gore, but it is one of the scariest movies to come around in a long time.

Watching it in the grandly renovated auditorium of the Adelphia-Astoria, Jeffers laments that Hollywood doesn't produce more films like Signs. "You don't need explosions to get the attention of your audience," he muses. "This is just a good old-fashioned movie, a good old-fashioned creep show. I wish they made more like this."

Jeffers has always liked films that use the craft of filmmaking more than special effects. Such movies, he says, fit with his vision of the Adelphia-Astoria, and of Trenton in general. This, he contends, is an old-fashioned city, still a place of neighborhoods and small businesses, churches and school friends and families. "If I existed," he says, "it's exactly the kind of place where I'd want to live."

Excuse me?

Trenton has always been a city of dreamers and romance. You see it every Christmastime when the ghosts of the Revolution stir the streets, you see it on nights when South Warren Street is parked up the First Friday evening of every month. So forgive us for dreaming, in these pages, of an old theater still showing pictures in the midst of the city. Though the Adelphia-Astoria is a myth, we easily imagine people lingering in front of its marquee to say their goodnights before driving home.

A man like Adam Jeffers, though, we don't have to imagine. We see him behind the window of every storefront on Broad Street, Warren Street, Hanover Street and Front Street. He is a man who understands that cities need more than arenas and ballparks and hotels to thrive. He knows the fabric of Trenton is made up of cleaners, gift shops, cafés and restaurants, accountant's offices and haberdasheries, insurance brokers and art galleries. Adam Jeffers gets no tax breaks. If his business fails, it is he-and not some bank or bondholder-who will struggle with paying off its debts. He approaches Trenton with the same faith some people bring to church and other people bring home to their families. It has nothing to do with feasibility studies and market surveys, and everything to do with building something.

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Issy Chaplin was recently laid off by the State of New Jersey. He is moving to California.